Poll: Who should get to spend all of that lovely cash?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1833371]

context.

Comments

[zz]

but then i am a civil servant that gets to buy toys with public money...

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I am enjoying the non biased presentation of the question.

[andrewducker]

I wanted to give option 1 every possible advantage, so that nobody could accuse me of biasing things towards the winning side.

Also, it's Friday :->

[andrewducker]

Oh, and I don't seem to have an email address for you. Could you drop yours to andrew@ducker.org.uk so I can drop you a line? Thanks!

[hano.livejournal.com]

I see what you did there. Have you considered a career with a right wing news organisation? The Daily Mail could clearly use a man with your skillset...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I just think that Gift Aid is unnecessary complexity. If we think that we should be giving government money to charities that receive private money, let's just do that according to some fixed proportion. But better still, let's not.

[andrewducker]

Sadly, I don't think The Daily Mail is a satire designed to make people rail against obvious stupid nastiness and cause a resurgence of feminism.

That would be The Republican Party.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

most charities are a horrendous scam...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I'd assumed it was a cognitive hack to encourage charitable giving.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

If you take the view (as I do) that part of the moral authority for raising taxes is that some of the assets used by individuals or organisations to create the wealth they enjoy are communial then I think it only fair that the group gets some input to decisions about where "surplus" wealth is spent.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Well charity tax is my bread and butter, so I think the Treasury's latest brainwave is horrendous. I do think it's reasonable that if people want to give to charity the government should give them tax relief on the donations. If you're a millionaire using a significant proportion of your vast income for the public benefit, why should you be taxed on it? I am baffled by a Chancellor of the Exchequer who seems to think that this is tax avoidance.

And I disagree with the person above who said "most charities are a horrendous scam". I work with a lot of charities, and they aren't.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure why giving money to charity should take precedence over the money being used to pay for the various needs of the government/population.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I don't see why people should expect to get out of paying tax by donating to charity, especially when Eton gets to be a charity! Millionaires can afford to do both.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I agree with Andrew - just because you have saved 5 billion starving donkeys or cured AIDS doesn't absolve you of the need to contribute towards emptying the bins and sweeping the streets.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Is it really "getting out of paying tax"? I don't think there's any scheme in place where a person can actually give to charity and at the end of it have more money as a result.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I've got to agree here. It doesn't seem like tax avoidance for me. But I'm in the university sector so, like you, this scheme directly benefits me.

[andrewducker]

There's a difference between "Getting out of paying tax" and "Having more money". They can do the former, but not the latter.

Which is why I didn't phrase it in terms of whether they have more money at the end of the day, but in terms of whether we want the choice over where the money is spent to be done by the millionaires deciding who gets it, or the government*.


*Obviously, sometimes the government has a few millionaires in it. But you get my point :->

[anef.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that charities should replace the state sector - that would be silly. But the point about charities is that people are enthusiastic about and committed to them. The trustees are unpaid, and they bring in a whole lot of volunteer support that the state cannot mobilise. Therefore they can achieve better targeted (and cheaper) results with the tax monies than the state can.

[steer.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between "Getting out of paying tax" and "Having more money". They can do the former, but not the latter.

Indeed... it's just that casting it as "tax avoidance" makes it seems like the person in question would actually benefit, which is not the case. It doesn't seem like this is something which could be cynically exploited -- there doesn't appear to be an "exploitable hack" here. So why has this suddenly (seemingly out of nowhere) been cast as "tax avoidance" by the government?

[andrewducker]

I can understand that - and I'm in favour of charities. I'd like to see them tightened up a lot though, if we're going to allow people to divert money from tax to them though. I'm happy to have (for instance) additional cancer care, or helping homeless people to be helped that way, if some of it can be more effective than taking the money in as tax and spending it that way. I am _so_ not happy with private schools getting money that could be used to help fund public education.

[anef.livejournal.com]

If we're talking about major donors, they pay taxes (usually quite substantial) on the income that they don't give to charity.

[andrewducker]

It _is_ tax avoidance. They pay less tax, and the money gets to go where they want it to. It's not tax evasion, that would be completely different.

And in this case it's come up because the government wants to put a limit on how much tax a person can avoid, as some are only paying 10% tax. By putting on a hard limit of how much tax a person has to pay (at least 25%, IIRC) they're preventing them from doing other things with the cash, and this is catching charities in the net.

And inspiring discussions about whether millionaires should be deciding where possibly-taxable money should be going, rather than the government.

[steer.livejournal.com]

It _is_ tax avoidance.

This reminds me of those arguments you sometimes get with libertarians who say "taxation is theft". In the end I gave up arguing and now just say "sometimes theft is brilliant and I'm fully in favour of some forms of theft, in specific taxation". So here I say "sometimes tax avoidance is great and I'm 100% in favour of some forms of tax avoidance".

And in this case it's come up because the government wants to put a limit on how much tax a person can avoid

I disagree strongly with the government's position here. If you take "income" to include money which a person immediately gives away to a good cause from which you personally get no benefit then I'm absolutely fine with very rich people paying a low rate of overall tax on their income and I am completely happy with arbitrarily high levels of tax avoidance.

This is in contrast to my normal positions of hating tax avoidance strongly and believing that very rich people should pay a high rate of overall tax on their income.

[andrewducker]

That's absolutely fine. I am strongly in agreement with the government's position here. I do not believe that someone should be able to say "I am giving all of my cash to the puppies foundation, because I think puppies are awesome." and thus not be giving any money towards the NHS, education system, etc, etc.

Which is fine, sometimes people disagree :->

Edit: I'm a little confused - your vote above seems to contradict your stance here.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

It's far, far easier to impose oversight and transparency on the latter option. I think it'll end up with a saner allocation of money.